The human paradox involves the separation between the individual, the group and reality itself.
As more than one wise person said, “Reality is what persists even when you’re not thinking about it.”
The individual is a known quantity, except that we cannot know the individual without the group. To truly see ourselves as separate from others, we must interact with those others.
It is the group that seems to invert ideas. Freedom for the individual translated into a group becomes an insatiable demand for absence of standards, which in turn requires spineless obedience and synchronized conformity.
Others have noticed this tendency:
The insanity and self-destructiveness of so-called “normal” human beings and societies easily surpasses what the most “mentally ill” and “delusional” individual is capable of. – Chronicles of Dissention
There is truth to this. An isolated individual can be destructive, but a mass craze, trend, meme, fear or assumption can run a civilization into the ground and destroy all traces of its advancements.
Why is this?
The herd is an echo chamber. If an opinion is popular, the herd echoes it back and forth to its different parts, and then notions in the individual head replace reality itself.
Even more, as anyone can tell who has played the game “secret,” in which a secret is whispered on one side of the room and passed person to person to arrive in incoherent form on the other, herds have a tendency to distort information into whatever is convenient for the speaker. There is no obligation to truth or faithfulness!
But most of all perhaps is that the herd is external:
The explosion of social media, she believed, left hundreds of millions of users with connections that were more plentiful but also narrower and less satisfying, with intimacy losing out to efficiency. It was time, Losse thought, for people to renegotiate their relationships with technology. – The Washington Post
The person above wants to blame social networking for making people isolated. It’s a clever thought, but only a partial one.
What isolates people is social circumstances that force them to limit who they are. The herd becomes dominant, and demands certain standards so its members are not threatened, and then forces those in turn on all of its members.
For example, if the demand is for us all to be equal, we cannot speak about inequalities or even notice the obvious. The winners there are incompetents and dysfunctional types, who are now equal to super-efficient geniuses in the eyes of the herd.
Our society is insane because for the past 2,000 years or more we have been steadily moving more and more toward a society based in the individual, which immediately becomes a herd that replaces reality.
Individuals need to band together or other individuals might savage them. It’s civilized anarchy.
When you look at how much is dysfunctional, and how little is trustworthy, think on how paradoxical and yet logical it is that the herd might be more insane than the individual.
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Mortality is a herd instinct.
The herd is scary in and of itself. Intolerance of objective criticism, reasoning, or thought outside of it. Hence why as it self destructs, people in it will never conclude that they are the cause of it. And on top of it, continue to persecute those outside of it as the cause of the destruction within it.
As the herd here in this nation strains the system into complete dysfunction and collapse, I cannot empathize with them. Nor will their suffering sway my emotions. Because I’ve seen the destructive forces it directs at those who are not a part of it.
“The herd is an echo chamber. If an opinion is popular, the herd echoes it back and forth to its different parts, and then notions in the individual head replace reality itself.”
The deconstructionist, or leftist, as some will call it, approach to this phenomenon is that the echoes of the herd can and do become the new reality; i.e., ‘Reality is a social construct, man.’
From my experience, people who think this way, especially young people, are anything but open minded. These people are usually unwilling to approach anything that deviates from their ‘interpretation of reality,’ and yet usually are the first to say that everyone is entitled to their opinion. Constructive discussion among people such as these is simply impossible. Logic is superseded by the presumption that everyone is ‘right,’ in their own special way.
As a result, if one engages with an individual of this mindset, and points out a flaw in their viewpoint, shit hits the fan. This sort of thing was addressed in yesterday’s article. It’s as if these people hold their personal ideologies as sacred, immovable representations of themselves.
Discussion cannot occur with these people; it always, always reverts to Debate, where there is a winner and loser — and where the notions of right and wrong are erased.
The only solution, in my…opinion, is simply just not to engage with such people.
I have spent a lot of time researching things of this nature, ‘group-instinct’, but even so I haven’t been able to come to any definite conclusion.
I’d like to peg the social beings as weak individuals but they can certainly have intelligence, humility and various strenghts on their own. On the upside herds bring collaboration, fun and the kind of stuff only human presence can give. Only herders are interested in herding, leaders tend to be very social animals.
The closest I have come to the nature of a herd-human are that they have a big need to find a group to ‘belong to’. Rarely do they make one of their own. This group alleviates pain in them, they have come home, they are safe. And they usually find an agenda too. Their human needs are met.
So they can’t go against the group, naturally if you do you lose a lot of friends, ‘love’, fun and you lose your importance and security while at the risk of making enemies. They leave only if they are:
1. forced out.
2. replace it with another group which satisfies their needs. Same way you change cigarettes for a better replacement – nicotin chewing gums, or something worse – heroin.
3. A life turn around. Shock, death, fatherhood springs them into a new route
If there’s a good leader then it doesn’t matter much if the herd is a little bit crazy. But this is not how the world works, real leaders are rare.
Supporting the health of a population must be more important than anything else. That is not so easy. A leader has more influence and impact than a group of leaders, though it comes with other risks and expenses.
Why the health of the population over anything else such as their wealth? Because people are their health and act accordingly.
People make use of the group to blame it or it’s enemies for anything they like. Naturally this means their own shortcomings. Especially when more unhealthy. These people are naturally drawn towards the left and the left will if grudgingly take care of them. I believe this must be the case in America.
The herd runs a great risk of going insane since they have such a hard time leaving the group – it tends to the individuals needs. So they follow group-standards and not their own. Not thinking or feeling for themselves but letting in those standards instead. But some come through to tend for the herd.
How do you know they still have their own standards different from the group standards? Is there a constant conflict?
If their own standards conform to the group standards, there is no much difference between the herd behavior and the behavior of a group guided by the values of tradition.
“Only herders are interested in herding”. I meant only social people do it. They are the herd and the leader, too.
Can there be an opposite of an autistic person? Like a person who doesn’t have any world at all inside their own mind and instead can only look to others for opinions and habits and urges? One of the things I ponder.
It would be an individual, but not a person. Some people are close to this condition though are hiding it.
“Our society is insane because for the past 2,000 years or more we have been steadily moving more and more toward a society based in the individual, which immediately becomes a herd that replaces reality.”
As I read this, I immediately thought of a REAL herd of animals, such as perhaps antelopes or gazelles on the savannahs of Africa.
I remember watching a nature show years ago, which featured just such a herd crossing a crocodile-infested river en mass. The herd had many animals in it, perhaps thousands. The narrator explained the psychology behind this herd and why it would cross in such a tightly packed formation. He said that the idea behind the method of movement was to actually minimize losses to the herd at the jaws of the crocodiles, and that losses are far greater with the method used than if individuals tried to cross in small, scattered groups, or alone.
Now, if these animals were humans, no one would take the first step into the water because no one would want to be eaten. However, if no one took that first step, no member of the group would likely live for much longer, as the migration is necessary to reach greener pastures with adequate supplies of water. The “human” herd in this case would be acting on their knowledge of reality – that the waters are dangerous and will be deadly for at least some – and their fear of a violent death.
These two factors combined would actually end up doing more harm then good though, as you can imagine the moment when each individual of the heard begins fighting one another for the limited resources on the one side of the river, and those who aren’t able to secure food/water/shelter would eventually be driven mad by malnutrition and probably wander into the river alone, as an easy target, anyway.
One of the things, if not the thing, that decided me to board my rotting, plywood, deathtrap of a trimaran, and sail off into the far blue deeps, was the utter go-nowhere-ness of the life I was living on land.
I would rather have risked my very life, than go on living among the lunatics I was living among. But I didn’t know then, that they were lunatics; I thought that I was, because how could so many of them all be crazy? It had to be me. Didn’t it?
And within weeks, I was as sane as sane could be. Healed. Recovered. And increasingly aware that millions of people can be wrong. Can be insane.
Hitting the oceans, alone, for weeks, months, years, was the best thing I ever did. It cost me everything, ultimately, but nothing that I couldn’t afford to lose.
And, in return, I gained a life.
I started doing yoga. Not the fad yoga/pilates/butt blaster but the closest I can find to traditional yoga that is a healthy discipline.
“I asserted that the world was mad,” exclaimed poor Lee, “and the world said, that I was mad, and confound them, they outvoted me.”
Coleridge